Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Weather Program Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The Weather Program Manager leads and coordinates complex weather and climate service programs that deliver operational forecasts, analytics, model development, and data products to internal and external stakeholders. This role combines atmospheric science domain knowledge (NWP, remote sensing, verification) with program and project management disciplines (budgeting, scheduling, risk management, vendor and contract oversight). The manager translates scientific requirements into engineering and operational deliverables, ensures program alignment with strategic objectives, and continuously improves forecast quality, data pipelines and customer experience.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Meteorologist or Lead Forecaster with operational experience in an NWS, private weather company, or research lab.
Project Manager in data science, geospatial, or earth science programs with exposure to weather/climate projects.
Technical Program Manager or Product Manager for cloud-based data/analytics platforms serving environmental use cases.

Advancement To:

Director of Weather Programs or Head of Forecasting and Decision Services.
Senior Program Director for Climate and Environmental Intelligence products.
VP of Product & Operations for meteorological services or commercial weather company.

Lateral Moves:

Technical Product Manager for NWP or satellite products.
Chief of Forecast Operations or Senior Science Program Manager in government agencies (e.g., NOAA, DoD).
Program Manager for environmental data platforms or climate risk solutions.

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead the end-to-end planning, execution and delivery of multi-year weather programs that include numerical weather prediction (NWP) model upgrades, forecast operations, satellite/radar product integration, and customer-facing services; ensure program deliverables meet technical specifications, schedules and budget targets.
Develop and maintain comprehensive program plans (scope, schedule, resource allocation, milestones, dependencies) and translate scientific roadmaps into actionable engineering and operations work streams using best-practice PM methodologies.
Serve as the single point of accountability for program performance by establishing KPIs, SLAs and acceptance criteria for forecast accuracy, system availability, data latency, and product quality; track metrics and drive continuous performance improvement.
Oversee budget creation, forecasting and financial management for weather programs, including capital and O&M budgets, variance analysis, cost-benefit assessments and reporting to executive leadership and funding stakeholders.
Manage vendor relationships, statements of work (SOWs), procurements and contract negotiations with cloud providers, modeling software vendors, remote sensing product suppliers and systems integrators to ensure contractual performance and cost control.
Coordinate cross-functional teams of atmospheric scientists, data engineers, software engineers, product managers and operations staff to deliver integrated weather products and services on schedule and to scope.
Drive requirements definition and prioritization for NWP model development, data assimilation improvements, ensemble systems and verification frameworks by synthesizing stakeholder needs and scientific tradeoffs.
Lead operational readiness and transition activities to move prototype model physics, new satellite ingest streams or ML-based forecast tools into 24/7 production environments with runbooks, checklists and rollback plans.
Establish and enforce governance and risk management frameworks (risk registers, mitigation plans, decision logs) to identify program risks (technical, schedule, regulatory, operational) and drive timely mitigation.
Define and implement QA/QC processes, verification/validation (V&V) strategies and bias-correction approaches to quantify forecast skill improvements and validate new products against benchmarks and independent observations.
Drive data strategy and architecture decisions for weather data pipelines, including ingestion of satellite, radar and surface observations, metadata standards, data lineage, and cataloging for reproducibility and traceability.
Collaborate with cloud architects and SRE teams to design scalable, cost-effective cloud-native deployments for NWP and data processing workloads using containers, orchestration (Kubernetes), serverless services and IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation).
Prioritize and oversee integration of machine learning, AI-based post-processing and probabilistic forecast layers into operational products while maintaining interpretability and operational reliability.
Manage stakeholder engagement and communications across government agencies (NOAA, DOD), commercial clients, utilities, transportation operators and emergency managers to align product roadmaps with customer needs and regulatory requirements.
Lead incident response, business continuity and disaster recovery planning for forecasting operations to ensure continuity of service during outages, extreme weather events or infrastructure disruptions.
Prepare and present program status briefings, technical reports and executive summaries for senior leadership, boards, customers and funding agencies; translate technical results into business impact and ROI narratives.
Recruit, mentor and develop high-performing teams; define roles, career development paths and performance objectives while fostering a culture of scientific rigor and operational excellence.
Coordinate grants, cooperative agreements and public-private partnership proposals; write technical sections, manage budgets and ensure compliance with funding terms and deliverables.
Ensure compliance with data governance, privacy, security (FedRAMP, NIST) and export control requirements for weather data products and analytics platforms.
Implement continuous improvement processes (post-mortems, retrospectives, lessons learned) to capture operational insights and accelerate model development and product delivery cycles.
Lead forecasting operations scheduling and shift readiness: define staffing models, handoff procedures, and operational SOPs to support 24/7 forecast production when required by clients or mission.
Evaluate and adopt new instrumentation, remote sensing data sources, radar networks and in-situ sensors; coordinate testing, ingest pipelines and calibration/validation activities to expand observational coverage.
Drive commercialization and productization strategies for weather services including pricing, service tiers, SLAs and go-to-market collaboration with sales and customer success teams.
Oversee technical documentation, knowledge bases, runbooks and training materials to enable consistent operations and reduce single-point dependencies.
Facilitate cross-organizational scientific review boards and technical working groups to prioritize research-to-operations transitions and maintain alignment between R&D and operational needs.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Coordinate outreach and training sessions for customers and internal users on new forecast products and interpretation guidelines.
Represent the program at industry conferences, workshops and inter-agency working groups to showcase results and attract collaborators.
Assist in proposal development and business development activities by providing technical input, cost estimates and program timelines.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Meteorology & Atmospheric Science: deep understanding of NWP, ensemble prediction systems, model physics, data assimilation and forecast verification methodologies.
Forecast Operations & Decision Support: operational forecasting workflows, shift operations, SOPs, and emergency response coordination.
Program & Project Management: proven experience managing multi-disciplinary, multi-year programs; familiarity with PMP, PRINCE2, or equivalent frameworks; strong scheduling and resource management skills.
Cloud & Infrastructure: practical experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation).
Data Engineering & Analytics: experience with ETL pipelines, streaming data (Kafka), time-series databases, metadata management and data quality controls.
Programming & Scripting: proficiency in Python and/or R for automation, analysis, model post-processing and pipeline orchestration; SQL for data querying.
Remote Sensing & Radar Integration: knowledge of satellite products (GOES, Himawari), radar ingest, calibration and application to model initialization and verification.
Machine Learning & Post-Processing: familiarity with ML-based bias correction, downscaling, probabilistic calibration and interpretability techniques for weather products.
Systems Integration & APIs: experience designing and managing APIs for product delivery, real-time data feeds, and client integrations.
Verification & Validation Tools: skill in developing verification frameworks, contingency testing, model intercomparison and statistical performance reporting.
Security & Compliance: understanding of data security, access controls and regulatory frameworks such as FedRAMP, NIST, and export control where applicable.
Contracting & Vendor Management: experience creating SOWs, managing vendor performance, and handling procurements for scientific and cloud services.

Soft Skills

Strategic Leadership: ability to define program vision, align teams to objectives, and influence stakeholders across technical and non-technical groups.
Communication & Presentation: clear verbal and written communication for technical briefings, executive updates and customer-facing materials.
Stakeholder Management: track record of building trusted relationships with government agencies, commercial clients and academic partners.
Problem Solving & Decision Making: pragmatic approach to trade-offs, risk mitigation and rapid prioritization in operational contexts.
Collaboration & Team Building: experience leading cross-disciplinary teams and mentoring scientists, engineers and operations staff.
Adaptability & Resilience: comfort operating in fast-paced, high-consequence environments and managing ambiguity during extreme events.
Negotiation & Conflict Resolution: skill in negotiating contracts, schedules and resolving competing stakeholder priorities.
Detail Orientation: commitment to quality assurance, reproducibility and rigorous scientific validation.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Meteorology, Atmospheric Science, Earth Science, Environmental Science, Computer Science, Engineering, or related quantitative field.

Preferred Education:

Master’s or Ph.D. in Meteorology, Atmospheric Science, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science with a focus on geoscience applications, or an MBA for senior program leadership roles.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Meteorology / Atmospheric Science
Computer Science / Software Engineering
Data Science / Applied Mathematics
Earth & Environmental Science
Systems Engineering / Industrial Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 7–15 years of combined experience in meteorology, forecasting operations, and program/project management with increasing responsibility.

Preferred:

10+ years managing complex meteorological programs or operational forecasting centers.
Demonstrated experience integrating scientific R&D into production, managing vendor ecosystems, and leading cloud-based deployments.
Certifications such as PMP, Agile/Scrum, or relevant technical certifications (AWS Certified, Google Cloud Professional) are highly desirable.